Speaking to the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admitted that the developers feared some low scores for Baldur’s Gate 3 due to potential bugs encountered by reviewers. This explains why review codes were only sent a handful of days before the PC launch.

We were worried, like, they’re gonna score it six out of ten, seven out of ten. There’s going to be a bug, something’s going to happen, it’s going to break down, everybody’s going to hate it. So that was literally our mentality going in, knowing that the content was good, but we were afraid of that. That was the thing that frightened us the most because it’s a very big game, and so we know that stuff can go wrong, although the game usually finds a way of settling back on its feet.